A response to “Cargo Cult Nostalgia” by Peter Silk (maker of the amusing nautical exploration game “The Wager”). You should read that article first (edit: and be sure to read Peter’s comments below), else this probably won’t make any sense.

I essentially agree that the Cargo Cultists might be sometimes fooled by the feeling of nostalgia and focus on the ‘trappings’ as a proxy for the real attributes that they enjoy in a game. But I also think it’s unfair to dismiss all their requests as driven by purely ‘nostalgia endorphins’. Some of these requests no doubt come from their dissatisfaction with design decisions taken for many modern point-and-click adventures that aim to broaden their target market and as a result fail to satisfy a certain type of player.

It’s essentially an on-rails score attack shooter. It can be finished (without giving away too much, in under 10 minutes play time), but it gets hard. It appears that as of the time of writing (10-Apr-2013), no one has beaten the last sector yet.

Kongregate

I decided early in the project this would be my first experiment with Kongregate. Could a simple but (hopefully) amusing Unity game without a massive art asset budget capture the attention of players enough to make some ad revenue ? Like ANY ad revenue ? Continue reading…

I just uploaded Chomper Deluxe to the #OUYA marketplace (yay!). It’s sitting at “Verifying APK” at the moment (hmmm…). I suppose that’s a good thing, since I assume that they might be doing a little malware scanning, or at bare minimum trying to catch broken uploads before they go out to review.

I presume that at some point soon that will change to “Verified” so that I can press the “Submit for Review” button …

Update: It finally finished verifying, after about 8~12 hours. I’m guessing the pipeline went down and someone in San Francisco was asleep when I submitted.

I presume there will be no issues in the review – it seems to comply with all of their fairly reasonable guidelines as far as I can see. I look forward to seeing you all beat my highscores on the 28th / 29th / 30th / whenever your OUYA arrives in the mail :)

Twitter has deprecated version 1.0 of their API, and all Twitter clients must now use version 1.1, so I’ve updated Wrist Tweets accordingly (courtesy of JTwitter v2.8.1).

<rant>

I hate Twitter. They should have become a decentralized open protocol by now (like the oldest killer app of the Internet, good ol’ email), but they continue to be asshats and rather than work toward the obvious end game for short messaging, they are working to further centralize and kill third party Twitter clients. It was uncanny really – literally days after the first release of Wrist Tweets, Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s Platform Director, told developers to stop making third party Twitter clients that “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience”. Even though Wrist Tweets isn’t really a client that mimics the ‘mainstream Twitter experience’ (it only receives tweets, and doesn’t send them for starters), I would have never started developing it if I’d known Twitter was going to start moving toward becoming a walled garden. Still, I’m happy this little plugin has helped people get more out of their LiveView devices (including me !), and I’m committed to keeping it working for the foreseeable future, as long as Twitter allows that to be possible.